Strategic Restraint In The Anthropocene: Rethinking Military Strategy Amid Existential Ecological Risks. The US Operations In The MENA Region

This thesis investigates a central paradox in contemporary security politics: despite the growing recognition of environmental security within U.S. strategic discourse, why did this failed to translate into operational restraint during major post–Cold War military interventions? Framed within the Anthropocene, this analysis finds the failure on structural incompatibility between ecological limits and a security paradigm organized on dominance, fossil-fuel–dependent power projection, and anticipatory threat perception. Drawing on the traditionally understood concept of strategic restraint, the dissertation reinterprets it in ecological terms. Given that we live in a time defined by planetary boundaries, restraint must also involve self-limitation in relation to environmental sustainability. Through process-tracing of the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the research examines how environmental concerns were articulated, marginalized, compartmentalized, and legally displaced within strategic planning and operational conduct. The findings reveal recurring mechanisms of non-translation: hierarchical threat framing that subordinated ecological risk, institutional insulation of environmental expertise, structural fossil-fuel dependency, and the retrospective management of environmental harm. Even as global climate governance expanded—through the Rio Earth Summit, the Kyoto Protocol, and subsequent agreements—military emissions and wartime ecological damage remained shielded from effective accountability. The study concludes that environmental security, while rhetorically acknowledged, has not become a constitutive principle of U.S. grand strategy. By exposing the structural gap between environmental recognition and military practice, this thesis contributes to debates on security in the Anthropocene and calls for a rethinking of strategic restraint under conditions of ecological constraint.